WHICH IS WHICH.

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hand of God; attributing all adversity, grief, sickness, loss of children, corn, and cattle to certain old women, living here on earth, and called witches; as though they themselves were innocent and had deserved no punishment. In such calamities they hurry and ride at once to the witch, and seek comfort or remedy in their tribulation."

Hail or snow, thunder or lightning, rain or wind, were all attributed to witches; and at the first shower the cry was, "Ring the bells, fumigate the air, and burn the witches:" the shrewd sceptics on such occasions would shake their heads, and say: "If all the devils in hell were dead, and all the witches in England burnt or hanged, I warrant you we should not fail to have rain, hail, and tempest, as now we have according to the appointment and will of God, and according to the constitution of the elements and the course of the planets, wherein God hath set a perfect and perpetual order."

In one parish alone, Scott mentions, there were eighteen women who claimed to be witches, and who professed by charms to heal the lame and blind: they were generally old, blear eyed, wrinkled dames, ugly and crippled, frequently papists, and sometimes atheists; of cross-grained tempers and cynical dispositions. The love of power or the love of money led them to play on their neighbours' credulity, and sometimes they were terrified

into a belief of their own evil influence; they were often poisoners and generally monomaniacs; they were hated and feared by the villagers, amongst whom they begged; while those whom they cursed were considered doomed men. Epilepsy, murrain, and all doubtful diseases were by ignorant physicians, in self-defence, set down to the agency of witches; the old woman's curse and a death being contemporaneous, were necessarliy thought to be cause and effect; or the witch herself, alarmed at the apparent fulfilment of her wish, would perhaps confess to a justice that her power had produced the evil. She is burnt, and the village are henceforward implicit believers in witchcraft, as a proved and historical fact.*

Witches sent storms and barrenness, drowned children, made horses throw their riders, brought the ague, and could kill with evil eye, slay with lightning, dry up springs, pass through keyholes, go to sea in cockle shells, raise the dead, and prevent butter coming.

They could fly in the air where they would on a broomstick or a fern stalk: no detection of a witch's impotence could satisfy the peasant that these women were not invested with supernatural power.

They were accused of blaspheming God; sacrificing

*The Manningtree Witches, a true and exact Relation, &c., 1645.

DEVIL'S SABBATHS.

*

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their children to spirits; as they boiled infants, eat human flesh, and poisoned men. They were said to make two covenants with the devil, one public and one private, at their great witch sabbaths, when the devil appeared to them in person, exhorting them to fidelity, and promising them long life and prosperity. Then the novices were presented, and instructed to renounce the Christian Faith, despise the Sacrament, tread on the cross, and break the Fasts, joining hands with Satan, paying him homage, and yielding him body and soul. He then charged them to bring more novices, and taught them to strangle unbaptised children, or steal them from their graves and boil the flesh; of the fat they made ointment, which when rubbed on their bodies enabled them to fly in the air; the rest they melted and drank with certain horrid ceremonies. Some witches sold themselves for a term of years, and some for ever: they then kissed the devil, and signed their bond with their blood, and a banquet ended the meeting: their dances, holding brooms in the air, were, it was said, accompanied with shouts of "Ha-ha! devil, devil! danse here, danse here! play here, play here! sabbath, sabbath!" During their absence at these festivals, spirits took their shapes and appeared at home in their

* King James's Demonologie.

absence, but these deputies would vanish at hearing the name of Jesus. Before they departed Satan gives them philtres and amulets, and puts his marks upon his minions. To him they are bound to offer every day a portion of their blood, or the dead bodies of dogs and cats.

The self-accused witches were often hypochondriacs, and still oftener ignorant women driven by despair and fortune to confess any charge made against them: they were sometimes ventriloquists, and pretended to have "familiars" inside them, which could answer every question. In this way, in 1572, a Dutchman at Maidstone pretended to be possessed of ten devils.

A night walk in the sixteenth century not only gave you a chance of meeting a witch in the shape of a hare or a cat, but the devil, with horns, fiery breath, tail, eyes like a bason, teeth like a dog, claws like a bear, "skin like a niger," and a voice like a lion.

The nurse scared her children with stories of bullbeggars, urchins, elves, hags, and fairies, changelings, Kelpie, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorne, the night-mare, the man in the oak, the Will-o'-the-Wisp, and the Puckle, Tom Thumb, Hobgoblin, Tom Tumbler, and Boneless, Hell wains and demon dogs.

The English Solomon's opinions, wise as they are against witchcraft, could not properly fall within the range

of our subject, were it not that he was a contemporary of Elizabeth's as well as her successor.

The royal writer begins by vehemently denouncing Reginald Scott as little better than a Sadducee, because he had denied the existence of witchcraft. The book is dull and pedantic, stuffed with scriptural allusions and odd scraps of classical learning. His design in writing and dilating "on the genus, but not the species or differentia of demonology," was not he assures us to show "his learning," but to convince the unbelieving or wavering of the fearful abounding of those detestable slaves of the Devil, God's hangman, the witches or enchanters.

His first chapter falls foul of the witch of Endor. He then proceeds to consider the charms used by "daft wives," to cure the worms or stanch blood; and the predictions of astrologers, by which they learned who should be the victor in a singular (single) combat, or who should win at a horse race: these he calls the devil's rudiments, from which men climb up the slippery stairs of curiosity, and to satisfy their restless minds betake themselves to the black and unlawful study of magic.

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They that sup kail with the deil, have need of long spoons," is a warning to those who conjure spirits into circles, or write contracts with their own blood, at the risk of being carried off bodily if they violate any single